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A thinly fictionalized Russian travelogue in the style of
Madame Giovanni
or
Gil Blas en Californie.
In one of his (highly unreliable)
introductions, Dumas writes that at a moment when he was desperate for a
manuscript, the fencing master Grisier handed him a memoir of a three
years' stay in Russia during 1824-1826.
The book is a first person narration of Grisier's travels. Grisier hears
that fencing masters are well recompensed in Russia, so he sets off for St.
Petersburg in 1824. He describes the city, including a disastrous flood in
the winter of 1824-1825, uses the occasion to describe how Russian nobles
went bear hunting armed only with a knife. While in St. Petersburg,
Grisier meets and befriends the expatriate Frenchwoman Louise, and her
lover Count Alexis, an enervated Russian nobleman who becomes involved in
the Decembrist conspiracy.
In 1825, the Tsar Alexander died, and the Tsar's eldest son, Constantine
having renounced the throne, which then devolved upon the Tsar's younger
son, the Grand Duke Nicholas. The Decembrists subverted several military
units in Moscow by telling them that Constantine's renunciation was
fraudulent, and then Nicholas was an usurper. However, most of the army
remained loyal to Nicholas, and, after several tense confrontations, in
which a number of people were killed, the coup was put down and the
conspirators arrested. Count Alexis was arrested for his role in the
conspiracy and sentenced to death, later commuted to exile in Siberia on
the plea of Louise.
Louise decides to follow her lover into exile, and Grisier escorts her
across the Ural mountains and into Siberia, which is the occasion for more
travelogue and the opportunity fight off a marauding wolf pack. Louise is
reunited with Alexis in Siberia, they marry, and Grisier returns to France.
Curiously, the Decembrists are known to history as Russia's first liberals
and democrats, the Russian children of the French revolution, who sought a
constitutional monarchy for Russia. Dumas, a staunch republican, might
have been expected to feel sympathy for the Decembrists, but he does
not, painting them as a sinister combination of power-hungry manipulators
and fools. The Tsars are portrayed relatively sympathetically, though
Dumas does note the mental illnesses of Tsar Alexander, his father, and his
eldest son. None the less,
Le Maitre d'Armes
was banned in Russia, which
immediately assured it a wide readership.
When Dumas himself visited Russia for the first time, eighteen years later
(in 1859) he met the actual hero and heroine of his story in living in
Kazan (Louise's real name was Pauline), and discovered a thriving trade in
handkerchiefs and other kitsch bearing scenes from his story, as he
described in
En Russie.